Movie Review: On Any Sunday - The Next Chapter

Another generation of the Brown family takes on two wheels

November 9, 2014

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In 1971 Bruce Brown simultaneously celebrated and legitimized motorcycling to a worldwide audience that didn’t yet know how much they loved it. His iconic documentary On Any Sunday was a love letter to the suddenly popular motorcycle. Before Brown’s movie, motorcycles had a bad name to the average suburban conservative whose idea of a motorcyclist was Marlon Brando terrorizing small town homebodies in The Wild One. Brown showed instead families of dirt bikers, ice racers and flat trackers all out having a good, wholesome, two-wheeled time.

Now, 43 years later, Bruce Brown’s son Dana picks up the camera and tells his own motorcycle story with On Any Sunday The Next Chapter, a full-length feature documentary in wide release across the country right now. Like the original it covers everything motorcycle, from two anonymous friends nerfing each other on scooters way out in the desert, to the battle for the Moto GP title between Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa. In between is everything from ice racers roaring around a frozen lake in Alberta, Canada, to flat track racers flinging their bikes sideways at 120, exactly as they did 43 years ago. On sheer cinematography alone it’ll enthrall you, with HD slo-mo shots that leave you following a single dirt clod flung skyward by a motocrosser’s rear tire, wondering where it’s going to land.

Flat Track Racer - 120 mph and noooooo brakes! Photo by Red Bull

But while it can be visually stunning, it lacks some of the mirth, charm and storytelling of the first version. The serious parts of Bruce Brown’s (and Warren Miller’s, for that matter) movies were intercut with funny, goofy, dopey shots plugged in for laughs only – “The junior birdmen!” The story line of the new movie really has just the superbly shot MototGP title chase as the only thing close to a narrative thread throughout the film’s 90 minutes. Like its forebear it completely ignores the largest group of bikers, the Harley guys, almost all of whom are also as wholesome as the bikers portrayed in the movie, if a little scruffy sometimes. And there’s no mention of the insanely dangerous Isle of Man TT, Paris Dakar (now just Dakar and run in South America), or even much of the Baja racing Dana Brown covered in other movies. But you can’t possibly cover everything and this one will still hold your attention and make you want to get a motorcycle, a can of gas and some friends to ride with, just like the first movie did.

Dana Brown has also directed the mega-surf movie Step Into Liquid and the Baja desert racing epic Dust to Glory. His ability to condense something so vast into a relatively short space is a talent we hope to see focused on other subjects. Seeing this one will make you want to buy those othe Dana Brown docs on DVD, too, as well as his dad's Endless Summer and the first On Any Sunday. All the movies will – or at least hopefully may, depending on how sedentary you are - inspire you to get out and do something fun, just as thousands did in the ‘70s when the first one came out, and as thousands more went surfing in the ‘60s when Bruce Brown made Endless Summer. And if it doesn’t inspire you to act, it will at least entertain you with the stories of those who do, and that's all you can ask of a movie in the first place.